It's rough, janky, and unpolished, but it gets unfairly smeared and constantly thrown under the bus by drama queens and a pathetic hatedom with an unhealthy hate obsession for Keiji Inafune. Mighty No. 9 has its issues, trust me, but underneath its rough presentation and questionable design decisions is a game with more soul as a classic Mega Man successor in my opinion than its "favorized" brethren, Gunvolt. The game is often misattributed as a "speedrunning" game; while speed plays a part of Mighty No. 9's gameplay, but it is designed as a score attack game that encourages mastering Beck's mobility and momentum, learning level layouts and enemy patterns, skillfully utilizing your copied abilities, and performing feats to rack up as much points as possible. Its visuals are very amateur looking and sadly got turned into a laughing stock by detractors, but underneath the rough graphics are small details that showed there was some care put into the visual design and a strikingly colorful aesthetic that shows a glimpse of what could be done with its 2.5D graphics. The English voice-acting often gets ridiculed as "bad voicing" when honestly the actors don't sound nearly as horrendous as the games that came before it. The story is also not bad for what it is and has a humbling message of overcoming with self-doubt issues. The soundtrack however does shine through and feels right at home as a classic anime-inspired platformer. Where Mighty No. 9 falls short in my opinion is the rough difficulty curve, it doesn't properly explain its gameplay very well, a useless assist mechanic, stilted and lifeless in-engine cutscenes, and the online multiplayer being broken beyond playability.
This is a 2D platformer that wears its inspirations of its spiritual ancestors on its sleeve while fleshing out the failed scoring gimmick of Mega Man and turning it into a fast-paced, arcade-styled platformer. It deserves better than what the media and petty indie developers makes it to be.